Month: September 2009

I'll say it again. Band Directors hate KVIA-TV. I suppose you can say this is an opinion, but I'm going to state it as fact. Why? you might ask, and I will tell you. KVIA has a football program that airs each Friday at 11:00 p.m. or so, called Borderland Blitz. They send out camera guys to get footage for this show. But the KVIA cameramen, if they are covering your football game, LIKE CLOCKWORK wait until the bands start to perform, and then they go into the crowd, inciting fans to scream, hoot, holler, ring cowbells, wave their arms, and do anything to get themselves on television. And in the process of obtaining fan footage that perhaps might air for 3 seconds, they disrupt the band performances. They de-value our activity, they insult our programs and frankly, they're just plain rude. Yes, we know it's a football game. But it's a band performance, too. Yes, we know some people don't care about the bands. But a lot of people DO care. And the school districts spend thousands of dollars to provide bands, uniforms, instruments, the whole package, and then thousands more to bus them to all the games. Why do they do that? So cameramen can disrupt the performances? I don't think so.

At last night's halftime between Riverside and Franklin, BOTH bands had great performances ruined by the KVIA guy there. There were soloists we never heard. There were woodwind features in the music we never heard. There was drill we didn't notice because we were too busy trying to pinpoint the disturbance that moved from location to location across the stadium as the camera guy moved from group to group, trying to find the noisiest, most spirited group of fans to put on TV.

Don't misunderstand. I'm all for spirited partisanship at football games. I'm all for fans supporting their teams. But I'm also for the students. ALL the students. There were about 120 football players performing last night, and everyone behaved correctly in supporting them. But there were 240 band and auxiliary performers there, too, and they weren't treated very well by the KVIA broadcast media. And believe it or not, whereas during the football game it's appropriate to yell and scream, during the band performances it isn't. A lot of people think that because bands produce sound, it's OK to make sounds of your own while the band plays. Those people are wrong. When bands perform, the thing to do is to LISTEN and WATCH and try to appreciate the thousands of hours of rehearsal, practice, WORK, that is represented by the organizations on the field.

Perhaps the other television stations do the same thing, to be honest I can't really say. But I do know that every time, EVERY TIME, I see KVIA at a game I know there is going to be someone deliberately causing a ruckus while the bands play. It makes no difference if it's pre-game, or halftime, one band or two. KVIA is notorious in the band world for this.

When I was directing high school band I spoke to the KVIA camera guys a time or two and asked them to please wait until the band was finished; it made no difference. So now I am appealing here in cyberspace to the Sportscasters at KVIA-TV. Please quit screwing up the band performances! Please! Get your fan footage before the game, or during the game. And if you really want to be cool, maybe take a page from KTSM's NC-9 Overtime. THEY actually feature a Drum line from a band each week. How great would it be for you to do even a 30-second spot on a band, or pair of bands?